All Events

There are events for just about every age and interest at the Book Festival, bringing readers and writers together for inspiration, entertainment and discussion. Over 900 authors appear in around 1000 events, including novelists, poets, scientists, sportsmen, illustrators, comics creators, historians, musicians, biographers, Nobel and Booker prize-winners and many more besides.

Brutal, Sensual, Complex Stories

Thursday 16 August 15:30 - 16:30

‘The war will rip the masks from all our faces’ warns one character in Sigitas Parulskis’s Darkness and Company. Set in 1941, the novel descends into a moral abyss of Nazism and its effects on Lithuania’s history. The phrase could also apply to...

Secular Gods: Fear and Growth

Thursday 16 August 15:45 - 16:45

Why has fear gained such a morally-commanding position in society today? And why has the cult of growth hijacked our economic policy making? Leading sociologist Frank Furedi, in How Fear Works, and Financial Times editor David Pilling, in The Growth...

The First Flushes of Fiction

Thursday 16 August 15:45 - 16:45

Two heavyweight figures of Scottish literature are here to look afresh at their early works. Considered ahead of its time in 1987, Ron Butlin’s The Sound of My Voice has since been mightily hailed by Irvine Welsh while finding an adoring audience...

Queer Africa

Thursday 16 August 16:00 - 17:00

Chitra Nagarajan is an editor of She Called Me Woman, a groundbreaking collection of stories about life in Africa as a queer woman. These are narratives of first time love, curiosity and growing-up defying society's rules. In When We Speak of Nothing,...

Thursday 16 August 16:00 - 18:00

Age 7-10

Thursday 16 August 16:30 - 17:30

Author Joshua Davidson leads you through a wild hour of interactive fun as he introduces the next adventure in his Night Zookeeper series, The Lioness of Fire Desert. What will happen when Will and his friends go on a mission to uncover myths and...

The Very Modern Spying Game

Thursday 16 August 16:30 - 17:30

British authors Nick Harkaway and William Sutcliffe both tackle the prescient subject of surveillance in their latest novels set in the near future. In Gnomon Harkaway’s Britain has spying built into its DNA with every action and word being recovered...

A Life of Labour

Thursday 16 August 17:00 - 18:00

Roy Hattersley first stood for Parliament in 1959. Since then, he has been at or near to the centre of politics – and has also found time to write twenty-five books. Today, he talks to Alan Little about his years in government and opposition, the...

#BlackLivesMatter

Thursday 16 August 17:30 - 18:15

Fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, black voices are still routinely dismissed and black and minority ethnic people are under-represented across many areas of society but over-represented in our prisons. Today we highlight black...

Age 12+

Thursday 16 August 17:30 - 18:30

When friendship, mental health, love and death come into play, life can get pretty complicated. These are the key themes in Holly Bourne's Are We All Lemmings and Snowflakes? and Cat Clarke's We Are Young. Join two hugely talented authors of young adult...